Our only programme is that of the moral and material regeneration of the country
—Leopold II of the Belgians, re: the Congo

There is, however, a conscious social motive for imperialism. Imperialism has been embraced by the left of various countries through the ages, usually out of a love of the egalitarianism of the armed camp. In the time of Hobson, there was also the following set of convictions by "social imperialists": (a) that expansion abroad could remedy social ills at home; (b) that the propagation of one's own culture among the "lesser races" was the noblest act one could perform, and an essential step in ameliorating their misery; and (c) that there was a natural and inevitable analog between a paternalistic hierarchy among communities, and a benevolent paternalism within the community. Let us take these assertions in order.

EXPANSION ABROAD A REMEDY FOR DOMESTIC ILLS

In the 19th century the main domestic ills were unemployment, and therefore idleness, squalor, and discontent. Notice, Gentle Reader, my language has suddenly gotten perceptibly more Victorian. To treat the statesman of 1870-1920 with any fairness at all, it is essential to remember what problems he needed to fix and how he proposed to do it. Idleness, then, was seen on the one hand as both a moral failing and as a social vice. Any unemployed workingman was regarded as something of a rogue and a wastrel, but a lot of unemployed workingmen was regarded as a sort of epidemic of turpitude.² Public works projects, undertaken in medieval Europe or the late Speenhamland wage-subsidy law, were widely regarded as improvident, since there was no shut-down point for inefficient state ventures.

An obvious solution presented itself to the 19th century mind: colonies abroad, where surplus labor could emigrate. The surplus labor would adopt a virtuous farming lifestyle, while the scarcity of labor in the colonizing nation would drive up wages.

The US political establishment had its own cohort of dedicated social reformers: muckrakers and reformists, progressives and suffragettes—the political establishment was beset by fearless zealots. Many of these were, like the social reformers in Europe, social imperialists: Theodore Roosevelt, for example, regarded colonialism as a form of social redemption. The USA required a moral challenge, and the civilization of "little brown brothers" in places like the Philippines was a prime opportunity.

In this sense, imperialism was a sort of "extreme Boy Scouts"—hardly surprising since the founder was Mafeking hero Lord Robert Baden-Powell. (This is not intended to cast aspersions on the Boy Scouts in any way.) In fact, the outcome was as follows: capital was diverted from intensive development of productive research or infrastructure at home, to the extensive development of extractive enterprises abroad. Not surprisingly, technology evolved to favor the high-speed consumption of non-renewables. This diversion of capital far exceeded either net domestic savings or, of course, emigration of anybody. Even Britons did not emigrate to dominion countries at a compensatory rate, and emigration of the other European peoples was to countries that did not sustain their culture. The military in countries like imperial Britain became a class apart, while in Germany, Austria, and the USA, the majority of commissioned officers were a reactionary faction of junkers.

Hobson cites sociological surveys of "Tommies" to sustain his case:

"Soldiers as a class (I take the town-bred, slum-bred majority, mind) are men who have discarded the civil standard of morality altogether. They simply ignore it. This is, no doubt, why civilians fight shy of them. In the game of life they don't play the same rules, and the consequence is a good deal of misunderstanding, until finally the civilian says he won't play with the Tommy any more. In soldiers' eyes lying, theft, drunkenness, bad language, &c., are not evils at all. They steal like jackdaws. As to language, I used to think the language of a merchant ship's fo'c'sle pretty bad, but the language of Tommies, in point of profanity, quite equals, and, in point of obscenity, beats it hollow. This department is a speciality of his. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them. Looting, again, is one of his perpetual joys. Not merely looting for profit, but looting for the sheer fun of the destruction
Quoted in Imperialism, II.I.49

IMPERIALISM AS A NOBLE CIVILIZING MISSION

The propagation of one's own culture is a social goal that has been revived, not merely by the present US presidential administration, but by much of the DLC Democrats. The concept of regime change in Iraq is often gussied up in pop-history about democracy and markets blossoming in freshly-liberated countries. The essence of this historical/social narrative is that democracy and market economies are the manifestation of distilled fairness, that impartial administrations imposed by enlightened military administrations are the necessary and sufficient condition of peaceful coexistence. In fact, the markets imposed by US viceroys and satraps in Iraq have been anything but impartial, and those imposed by other imperial powers have been the same.

This delusion has not been confined to Americans; "American exceptionalism" is not, itself, exceptional. French, British, and other former colonial powers are perfectly capable of matching any Yank smugness for smuggery. Flag-brandishing is not required for one to suffer acute national narcissism. I humbly submit this excerpt from a speech of Jules Ferry, renowned social imperialist:

I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races .... In the history of earlier centuries these duties, gentlemen, have often been misunderstood; and certainly when the Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfill their duty as men of a higher race .... But, in our time, I maintain that European nations acquit themselves with generosity, with grandeur, and with sincerity of this superior civilizing duty.
[Speech, Chamber of Deputies, 28 March 1884]

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
[Minutes on Education, 2 February 1833]

IMPERIALISM AS INTERNATIONAL PATERNALISM

This leaves us with the final social goal of the Social Imperialists: a paternal hierarchy of states. This is a little different from the idea of mobilizing society for the noble undertaking of turning Chinese into Europeans, or Philippinos into Americans. The idea of international paternalism implies that entire societies need to be made wards of the mature, civilized nations. This notion is still very much with us:

I think the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over," said [Gordon] Brown, who is the chancellor of the exchequer. "I think we should move forward. I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologize for it. I think in particular that we should talk, rightly so, about British values," Brown said. "If we look at the whole span of history, then it's time to emphasize then that's at the core of British history, that's at the core of what people think most of when they think of Britishness," he told BBC Two's Newsnight. "And that's such a powerful potential influence on our future, then I think we should be talking about it more not less," Brown said
[NYT, courtesy of Chapati Mystery]

What form should intervention take? The most logical way to deal with chaos, and the one most often employed in the past, is colonisation. But... today, there are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the opportunities, perhaps even the need, for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the 19th century. Those left out of the global economy risk falling into a vicious circle. Weak government means disorder and that means falling investment. ...The weak still need the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and well-governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment and growth - all of this seems eminently desirable.

What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan value
[Guardian, 7 April 2002; emphasis added-JRM]

The language of both Cooper and Roosevelt seems to squirm with embarrassment at the threat of future state-to-state coercion, especially in the internal economic administration. On the other hand, there is also present the philosophy that the state's obligation is to ensure that everyone, everywhere, is in good order. As we have seen with the post-hoc justifications for the invasion of Iraq, this seems to be pulled in afterwards, to defend what was indefensible; it then remains a new principle by which to ruin the future.

(Eugenic Imperialism)